vSphere

Listing all Events for vCenter Server

12/16/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

I had a conversation with one of our VMware Cloud on AWS field leaders a couple of weeks ago at reInvent on his initial experience with the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. There were lots great feedback but one thing that stood out to me which looks to have been a barrier to getting started was being able to figure out a specific vCenter Event and its respective identifier. Although the list of "default" vCenter Events are documented in the vSphere API, it is definitely not the first place most folks would go to look nor is it very intuitive to browse.

To be honest, this is not a unique ask for VEBA. I have also seen this requests come up from customers who are automating vCenter Alarms, which can also be based off of vCenter Events and the same question has come up on before. One challenge with such a request is that the number and the types of vCenter Events will vary from customer to customer depending on the number of 2nd and 3rd party solutions deployed, not to mention it will also vary from version to version. In addition, as a customer, you can also publish your own custom Events into vCenter Server which makes this difficult to provide a single list that would cover all possible scenarios.

Ultimately, this ask is completely valid and I started to look at the vSphere API to see if there was something that could help. It did not take look before I stumbled onto the EventDescription which is part of the EventManager, which provides a nice registry for all currently registered vCenter Events. Time for some Automation 🙂

vCenter Event Broker Appliance Updates – VMworld, Fling, Community & Open Source

11/21/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMworld

At VMworld Barcelona, Michael Gasch and I had the privilege of presenting our #CODE1379E "If This Then That" for vSphere - The Power of Event Driven Automation session. The room was completely packed for a 9am session on Thursday after the big VMworld Party and we just wanted to thank everyone who attended the session and for those that came up to talk to us afterwards. We really had no idea how the session would be received but from the feedback, tweets and DM's we have received and continue to receive, it looks like the session really resonated with customers. In case you missed the session or could not attend VMworld, the session was recorded and is actually available for everyone to view. You just need to sign in with a free VMworld account.

VMware Fling

For those who attended the VMworld session in person, there was a nice surprise at the very end, which I think may be a VMworld first. Michael and I have been working on a side project in our spare time called the vCenter Event Broker Appliance or VEBA for short. This solution enables customers to easily create Event Driven Automation based on vCenter Server Events and rather than just showing off some cool demos, we wanted to leave the audience with something they can actually use right now!

With a little chant that was started by Emad Younis (this was NOT planned), the audience had spoken and wanted us to publish the planned VMware Fling which we were going to release in the coming days since we had just finished the process literally the week of VMworld. I figure its VMworld, this is what customers, partners and colleagues come here for and with a click of a button and crossing my fingers, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance Fling went LIVE.

Customizing vCenter Alarm Email Subject and Body

11/20/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

One of the automated actions that can be configured when a vCenter Server Alarm is triggered is to send an email notification. Over the years, I have seen a number of requests and questions about customizing the email and whether an email template exists. I personally have not used this feature much which has been around since the introduction of vCenter Server and mainly because I have always worked in an environment where we had dedicated monitoring tools that provide notifications including emails.

Most recently, I noticed an increase number of questions around this topic and I was curious on whether a solution exists today or if this is still a gap today? A quick Google search landed me on this 2013 VMTN thread which included several workarounds that customers have found. However, the only viable "supported" and "persisted" option at the time within that thread was to use the vSphere API/PowerCLI to customize the alarm action.

While going through this exercise myself, I found that our vSphere UI has had some enhancements since that 2013 thread and I thought it was worth sharing an update in 2019 on how customers can customize both the email subject and body for vCenter Alarms. One thing to note is that there is no generic email template that can be edited, the email customizations are applied on a per-Alarm action basis and this is applicable for both vCenter Server running in a traditional on-premises environment as well as for VMware Cloud on AWS or Dell EMC.

USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi adds support for Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) Adapter

09/27/2019 by William Lam 4 Comments

Today, we have an exciting update to give on our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling which has had two updates since releasing earlier this year and has been extremely well received by the VMware community. As many of you know, I am always on the look out for new and innovative tech that can help enable our customers, especially when it comes to building home labs to learn about the latest and greatest VMware software.

Several months back, I came to learn about a really cool USB-based Multi-Gigabit Network Adapter (QNA-UC5G1T) from QNAP which can negotiate with speeds up to 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps. I was not familiar with the multi-gig specification but it it looks like it was created as a standard back in 2016 as IEEE 802.3bz. This initially evolved from advancements in wireless technology but more recently it started to make its way into ethernet-based devices.

Although this particular device is from QNAP, the underlying chipset is actually from Aquantia, now part of Marvell. If the name sounds familiar, it should as Aquantia is also the vendor to Apple for their 10GbE NICs in both the 2018 Mac Mini and new iMac Pros. In fact, their chipsets are also used in a number of Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE NICs which also works with ESXi. Access to 10GbE is certainly more common these days but it certainly is not for everyone and not all platforms can be expanded to support it.

The QNA-UC5G1T device is not only small but because it is USB-based, you are more likely to have spare USB ports on your system than say a traditional PCIe slot or Thunderbolt 3 port. From a cost standpoint, this device is about half the cost of the 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter coming in at $79 USD and can be ordered from Amazon. As far as I know, QNAP is the only vendor who has produced a multi-gig USB adapter, but perhaps in the future, there will be other vendors.

Project Pacific – Workload Evolution in vSphere

09/10/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

Project Pacific was definitely one of the most exciting and most talked about announcement at this past VMworld. In case you missed the big news, check out this quick snippet of the Day 1 Keynote where Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda (one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, now at VMware) introduces Project Pacific to the world.

If you ask most folks what Project Pacific is about, they would probably answer something with Kubernetes and Containers in vSphere, which is a fair assessment, especially as Kubernetes was probably mentioned once or twice during the conference 😉

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

VMworld Startup: Hivecell – Stackable Edge Computing

09/05/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

One thing I really enjoy at VMworld when I have a few minutes to spare between sessions and customer meetings is to walk around the Solutions Exchange and learn about what our partners are doing in the VMware eco-system. I usually do not make it in very far before bumping into an old colleague or customer before having to run to my next engagement, but some times I get lucky.

While walking the show floor, I came across a really interesting company that immediately caught eye and you can probably guess why from the picture I took below.

The company is called Hivecell and they make it super easy for Global 500 companies to deploy and maintain software at the Edge without requiring a large IT team to manage the deployments which can be spread across hundreds if not thousands of sites with very little to no IT staff.

One of the biggest challenges with Edge Computing is being able to process the large quantity of data being generated in all of these remote locations on a daily basis. In some cases, the dataset can grow up to several Terabytes and it is no longer feasible to send all of this data to the Cloud or back to your Datacenter to extract the business intelligence and value. In fact, depending on the connectivity of your remote site, it can take weeks before the data is available. For any type of real or near-real time applications, the window where the data is of value can literally be hours if not minutes and it must be processed immediately at the Edge.

Speaking of use cases, here are some of the scenarios where Hivecell believes they can really help with their solution, more details about each use case can be found here.

Petrochemicals
Renewable Energy
Quick Service Restaurant Chains
Manufacturing
Healthcare
Weather
Data Science
Hotels